Luke 23:43 and Greek Punctuation

“And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” (KJV; similar in many versions)

The ‘Thief on the Cross’ is a hoary old chestnut. Jesus went to the grave after his death; likewise the thief. Paradise is not the grave. Christadelphians have often explained the verse by shifting the comma so that ‘today’ is attached to ‘Verily I say unto thee today, you shall be…’ which makes Jesus’ statement into an acceptable future promise of life in the kingdom.

In the absence of Greek punctuation in the early uncial manuscripts, the placement of a comma must be inferred from the context and precedent. However, textual and linguistic evidence is inconclusive.

  1. The Greek manuscripts do not all have the syntactic order ‘to you I say’ (soi le,gw); in fact the majority Byzantine tradition (BYZ) does not; and of the Egyptian tradition, neither do the Siniaticus or Alexandrinus codices. The GNT and UBS[1] go with the Egyptian tradition, but Hodges and Farstad[2] go with the Majority Text.
  2. In the GNT le,gw soi (13x) is more common than soi le,gw (6x), and in particular, all cases with ‘truly’ go with le,gw soi—thus suggesting that this arrangement is correct. Interestingly, GNT and BYZ agree for five of the six cases of soi le,gw, differing only in Luke 23:43.
  3. The Curetonian Syriac version of the NT has the comma placed after ‘today’, and this language is closer to the original Aramaic of Jesus’ speech than Greek and may therefore preserve the correct punctuation.[3]
  4. The adverb ‘today’ doesn’t have to be first in the order of words in the clause to which it belongs—see Luke 2:1; 5:26; 22:34; etc. It could go with ‘I say to you today, you will be…’ or ‘I say to you, today you will be with me’.
  5. In Acts 20:26 we have a use of ‘today’ that goes with the verb of utterance, i.e. ‘Therefore I testify to you this day’ (RSV). Compare also Deut 5:1; 27:1.

In the light of (1)-(5), there is no obvious syntactic ‘rule’ to call upon; the Greek can bear either punctuation, so the matter comes down to interpretation.[4]

[1] The Greek New Testament (eds. K. Aland, M. Black, B. M. Metzger and A. Wikgren; Stuttgart, United Bible Societies, 1966-).

[2] The Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text (2nd ed.; eds. Z. C. Hodges and A. L. Farstad; Nashville: Nelson, 1985).

[3]  B. M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (London: United Bible Societies, 1971), 181-182.

[4] See P. Boyd, “Today you will be with me in Paradise” CeJBI 6/1 (2011): 7-11.